The initiative kicked off last January, “so 2010 was kind of a ramping-up stage, getting staff and students engaged in the work, prospecting for companies to get them on board and getting projects under way,” said John Patten, director of WMU’s Manufacturing Research Center and the GMI.

The “university-industry based research collaborative comprised of Western Michigan University faculty, students, and staff, and 10-30 industry partner companies” had its kick-off meeting in May and its first semi-annual meeting in December. Kalamazoo firms Landscape Forms and Fabri-Kal both committed to the GMIC in December, and a third company was expected to sign on in late 2010 or early this year.

Schoolmaster

Member companies are very engaged in the entire process, said Carey Schoolmaster, program coordinator for the GMI. The consortium will help companies assess what projects they should tackle to reduce “the environmental and energy impact of their designs, materials, processes and facilities,” according to the GMI website.

For smaller companies, the consortium can focus on “low-hanging fruit,” Patten said. But for larger companies that have already tackled those obvious problems, it can work on the larger, more complex issues.

“If these were easy problems, somebody would have solved them already,” Patten said. “The problem is that they’re not easy and there’s no obvious solution, so they take more research and more time and effort to resolve.”

The list of companies the GMI has worked with is pretty extensive, he said. It includes Herman Miller Inc., Haworth Inc., Kellogg Co., Bell’s Brewery and others.

“You’re working with some of the cream-of-the-crop companies that are progressive and looking out to the future, not just looking in the rearview mirror behind them,” Patten said.

The GMI would like to get the consortium up to a total of five to 10 companies in 2011, and the long-term goal is 20.

In addition to the consortium helping individual firms with specific projects, member companies can also benefit from the interactions they’ll have with each other.

“It gives them a place to communicate if they have common issues that need to be solved,” Schoolmaster said.

One theme Schoolmaster and Patten have seen emerging from member companies’ conversations focuses on efficiency. Many are interested in moving from recycling all waste to eliminating waste completely so there’s nothing left to recycle.

“That approach — where people push the envelope, they have solutions, and then they can move on to the next area to tackle — is encouraging because we’re making progress,” Patten said.

The consortium also is interested in preventing problems that companies might face in the future.

“We’re looking ahead to what issues they’ll have in seven years that can be solved now so they don’t waste time,” Schoolmaster said. “With the students being creative and out-of-the-box thinkers, we’ll be able to nail some of those problems early.”

Initiatives such as the GMIC often have a lifespan of five to 10 years, Patten said.

“What happens after 10 years is either you solve all the problems that can be solved or people have changed their interest and they’re on to the next research endeavor,” he said.

But it might still have opportunities to continue after 10 years. The consortium can anticipate and plan for some long-term green-manufacturing issues, but not all of them, Patten said.

“You just don’t know where those opportunities are going to be,” he said. “But as we stumble upon them, we’ll take full advantage.”

Additionally, the university hopes that over those 10 years, green engineering becomes part of WMU’s curriculum so students entering the work force are trained in green practices, he said.

“You don’t need a research effort (then) because the engineers we’re training will be well-versed in that area and will be able to get out there and solve the problems on their own,” Patten said.

That shift has happened over and over again in the academic research world, such as with nanotechnology, he said.

“That would be my long-term hope — that we really put ourselves out of work in the green area by educating the next generation of engineers that just have that capability in their toolkit,” Patten said.